


To Invert the Ancient Course of Nature

by ChillinLikeVillains



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Barry Allen Needs a Hug, Barry Allen is one of The Rogues, Barry Isn't the Flash, Criminal Barry Allen, Dark Barry Allen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-09-21 01:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9526274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChillinLikeVillains/pseuds/ChillinLikeVillains
Summary: In one world, Joseph West gains custody of Bartholomew Allen after the murder of his mother and the arrest of his father. In one world, Bartholomew "Barry" Allen grows up to be a hero with a firm belief in doing the right thing.This is not that world.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The one where Barry grows up in the foster system, learns some things he shouldn't, and alters the course of history in the process (with Snarts and a certain assassin making guest appearances).





	1. And see how Fate, herself turn'd traitor . . .

**Author's Note:**

> There is a startling lack of Dark/Rogue Barry Allen in the Flash tag. That combined with a seven hour work shift consisting of doing nothing led to this.
> 
> Three warnings before you read:  
> 1) I know I tagged the Snarts and the Mist, and they are here, but only in passing and not even directly called by name. I love that snarky asshole and his sister, and if I do write more they will show up, but they didn't fit into this as it is. Sorry.  
> 2) I have zero experience with the foster system outside of mainstream media. I know not all foster parents are neglectful/abusive, but there are lots of horror stories out there. While I personally believe Barry directly post-murder wouldn't take much of a push to become dark, he still needed something. I'm sorry if anything I've written is offensive to those with experience with the system, and if you contact me directly I can edit it in a jiffy.  
> 3) This has not been beta'd. If you'd like to read more and/or become my beta, let me know. I'm a fanfic author, I live for that shit.  
> 4) EDIT: when writing the next chapter, I realized I accidentally made Barry and the Snart siblings closer in age than intended. I reworded a sentence or two to reflect their canon ages WHICH I WILL BE USING. Outside of that, nothing has changed. Sorry about that.
> 
> Enjoy!

When Barry Allen is eleven years old, a man in yellow lightning stabs his mother and puts the knife in his father’s hand. This is a story everyone knows.

Poor little Barry, the cops had whispered. So traumatized by what happened he made up a man made of lightning just to avoid blaming his clearly guilty father. Not even Joe West believed the boy, they muttered, and he’s practically the kid’s uncle. Such a sad story, did you hear West wants to foster the boy? Yeah, it’ll do him good to stay with a familiar face, especially after all that.

This is a story everyone knows. But stories, like all things, can be twisted by time until there’s nothing left of what the tale once was.

In one version of history, Detective Joseph West petitions for custody of Bartholomew Allen and wins. The caseworker assigned to the Allen case has three other ongoing ones and given how close of a friend the detective was to the family, it’ll be a good fit, right? And little Barry Allen grows up amongst cops, men and women who teach him how the justice system works and impress upon him rigid structures of right and wrong, good and evil, and that sad little boy grows into a man with lightning in his veins and his feet planted firmly on the side of the law.

That is one version of history.

It is not this story’s history.

For in this story, a different caseworker is assigned to the Allen case and she remembers a case from years ago: a brother and sister who had been abused by their father for years and were only free now because the man got caught red-handed during a robbery. Neighbors had called the police multiple times, only for the officers to brush them off as they knew the father and he couldn’t possibly do that to his own children, right?

This caseworker had come across the file only a few hours before she was called to the police station to meet Allen comma Bartholomew. She saw the fear in the little girl's’ eyes anytime someone dressed in dark blue ventured too close, heard the desperation in the teen’s - and he wasn’t really a teenager, not anymore - voice when he quietly asked her to stay in the room while the cops questioned them. She knew that, while the police meant well, they were human just like everyone else and humans made mistakes.

Only their mistakes could cost people their lives, and children their childhoods.

With that in mind, she sat down with young Barry Allen and listened to the whole sad and sorry tale, including how every cop had said they didn’t believe him, that he was lying or delusional. She didn’t believe him either, but she knew better than to tell him that and instead asked what he wanted.

He said that he wanted his mom. That he wanted to wake up from this whole nightmare and go back to the way things were before, and another caseworker in another time decided that meant he should stay with the West's. But this worker, haunted by a sister’s fear and a brother’s desperation, made a different decision that night.

She placed Barry with an emergency family at the edges of Central City and advised that Barry never be placed with the West’s as their presence might cause him to relive the trauma of seeing his mother murdered and his father taken away in handcuffs.

Eventually Barry’s caseworker received more files and had more children to look out for, and with Barry in stable condition he was moved to a group home once a week had passed.

And just like that, history changed.

_(On a lonely stretch of road a man from the future who became trapped in the past is attacked by a snarling creature made of bone and smoke, the timeline having been changed too much for him to be allowed to live. The spikes he set on the road are still there though, and a car crash still happens and a woman still dies and though a man dies that night too, it is not Harrison Wells. Years from now, his wife’s death will drive him to nearly kill himself trying to achieve their dream, but not yet. The future is far away, and for now a man crawls out of the car and brings his wife with him and begs her to live while they both leak blood onto the asphalt.)_

Barry went from group home to foster home and back again, his genius and obsession with the supernatural unnerving even the most experienced foster parents. He never knew physical abuse, but by the time he was a teen neglect and apathy had left their own kind of scars, and he had seen dozens of others like him with the physical ones to match. He knew he had been lucky so far, and that it might be a matter of time before he was sent to one of those “homes” too.

So, Barry adapted.

He had always absorbed information like a sponge, and he accepted whatever lessons the older kids managed to pass onto him between their stays. His long fingers made him a good pickpocket, his babyface and green eyes let him walk out of a store with half his jacket stuffed with merchandise, and though he would never be a hulking mass of muscle that could intimidate through sheer presence alone he had a mean right hook and fast feet. He knew how to disappear in a crowd and what prison tats looked like, including which ones meant he should run in the other direction as fast as possible.

The one lesson that no one had to teach him though, was that he should never trust a cop (he never forgot the whispers of _liar_ and _unstable_ and _delusional_ and _crazy_ , some of them uttered by a cop he had once considered an uncle). And given how familiar the precinct had been during his and Iris’ tenure as best friends, he recognized every cop in Central City.

_(When he was seventeen, two months away from aging out, he spotted three cops in a bar where a former foster sister worked and had smuggled him into. He had warned her, and she had warned the rest of the staff, and they had warned the patrons, who cleared out a full half hour before a planned raid was meant to begin. The cops spent months investigating a potential leak while Barry gained three drug dealers and a Darbinyan hitman who owed him a favor.)_

Against all odds, his luck holds until he turns eighteen, and Barry Allen is released into the world with no one by his side but others like him. Just as jaded, just as cautious, just as broken and morally ambiguous and self-preserving as he is.

_(The speedforce shudders, but it does not break. Little Barry Allen is the first, will always be the first, and though he may not be a hero in this timeline it will choose him regardless. It cares not for good or evil, black or white; it cares not for whether Central City will idolize the Flash or fear the Shadow. All it cares about is Barry Allen, and if he is satisfied, it will be too.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters won't always be beta'd. Sorry for any mistakes!


	2. Call your friends and haste away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barry Allen has walked into and out of the CCPD numerous times, and not because he's an employee. When a friend needs a favor, though, he needs a way in that doesn't involve handcuffs (of the not-fun variety, ya perverts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUESS WHO'S BACK MOTHERFUCKERS.
> 
> Nah but I didn't realize I had posted this in January until I was scrolling through the Dark Barry tag and thought, "Oh shit I didn't update." Sorry about that. Here's chapter two, and I'm afraid I have no idea when chapter three will be here. I've been torn between this and a Rogue's Gallery AU I'm doing, but that's besides the point.
> 
> Enjoy!

Barry probably met over a hundred kids during his time in both foster care and group homes, and of those hundred not one of them operated on the right side of the law.

Seriously. Barry knew the statistics, knew that 76% of underage offenders came from the system and 62% of the Iron Heights population had a history with the same group homes Barry had slept in as a teen. Seeing it first hand wasn’t the same as reading a report, though, and once upon a time the fact that Barry failed to defy statistics would’ve bothered him.

Hell, it  _ did  _ bother him in the beginning.

But with every wallet he swiped with no one the wiser, every gas station who found themselves short on candy bars and pre-made sandwiches, every meal of his that was paid with cash that wasn’t, he found the guilt fading more and more.

After all, it wasn’t  _ his  _ fault the foster dad was a drunk and would come home from the ‘grocery store’ with nothing but liquor, and if that rich douchebag didn’t want his wallet stolen then why did he make it so damn easy? Really, he was lucky it was Barry that had bumped into him. Any other kid would’ve stolen his watch and rings too.

Barry wasn’t a klepto (though he knew at least three), and his preference for speed over size of the haul was rare amongst his ‘people’, as he heard the cops call them. While he got a lot of shit for slipping in and out, only taking what he needed, he was more than used to the casual ribbing he got from his foster siblings and group home occupants.

The growth spurt that forced him to up his “profits” as a teen was the last physical change that stuck; even at 26 he still got carded, and that combined with the fact that the only friends he bothered to keep in contact with are older than him ensured that he would forever be called ‘kid’, ‘little brother’, and his personal favorite ‘teddy bear’.

Don’t get him wrong, they were the only family Barry had (outside of an imprisoned father, but Barry knew better than to hope for the law to fix their mistakes) and they were more than happy to teach him all their tricks and let him crash on their couches during those first few months after he aged out.

Once he got a place of his own though, they often chose  _ his _ shithole apartment to hang out at, crash in, and on one memorable occasion break into while drunk to sleep off the oncoming hangover.

It wasn’t like it truly bothered him. The shoebox that was his apartment barely qualified as a safehouse, and he had long since lost any kind of shame or modesty when it came to them.

Barry just wished they would give him some kind of  _ warning  _ before picking the lock and waltzing in.

Especially when it was Eden doing the waltzing.

Take now for example.

“You want me to do what, exactly?”

“I want you to break into CCPD and - ,”

“Yeah, you can stop right there,” Barry said, cutting off Eden. “I’m praying to the god I don’t believe in that this is the sleep deprivation talking.” She glared, completely serious, and he continued, “The answer is hard to the fucking no.”

“But Barry Bear-”

“No. Absolutely not. Not worth it-”

“Bear-”

“-hell no. Not in your lifetime, and sure as fuck not in mine-”

“Barry-”

“-will I do this. I will deepthroat Vincent Santini-”

“Now that’s just excessive.”

“-before I willingly break into the goddamn  _ police station  _ just because you were so drunk on dick-”

“Excuse you, I do  _ not _ get dick drunk-”

“-you left your stash behind and it got taken by an undercover cop.”

Barry stopped to take a breath only to be faced with the saddest puppy dog eyes he had ever seen outside of his own reflection.

“Really Eden? You’re really gonna try that on me?”

The eyes got wider and she began to pout. “Please Barry? You helped Amber when she ran out.” 

Barry rolled his eyes and collapsed on the couch, sprawling on his back. His long legs spilled over the end as he bent one arm to rest his head on his hand and left the other to hang off the side. Eden’s eyes roamed appreciatively over his relaxed form and lingered on where his shirt rode up over his stomach, and he recalled that Amber once compared him to the cheetah she saw at the zoo: all grace and softness, with just a hint of danger peering through the eyes.

Her words, not his. Still he was flattered, and speaking of Amber . . . 

“First of all, her ‘drugs’ were estrogen and anti-androgen, not weed. And second of all,” Barry tugged his shirt down under the guise of getting comfortable, “I did not have to  _ break into a police station _ to get hers. I split my profits from lifted wallets with her 60/40 to help her out when her dealer jacked up the price, which she paid me back for it in a month’s worth free drinks.”

“I thought the free drinks were for life from spotting those cops that one time?” Eden asked as she took a seat on the floor near his head. She leaned back against the arm of the couch and stretched out her legs, kicking her heels off in the process and letting her eyes drift shut.

She must have had a busy night if she walked away without her pot, so he didn’t judge her too harshly for getting sleepy.

Barry shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him. “Nah, remember I helped her out two months before the cop thing. Why do you think I didn’t go drinking with you guys for a month?” Eden made a noise that was either vague understanding or sleepy grumbling, and knowing her it could very well be either.

Either way, he hoped she was tired enough to put her request to bed too.

Seconds later, his hopes were dashed when he heard her whine, “ _ Please _ Teddy Bear?” He turned his head and was met with pathetic-looking brown eyes, and in his mind he let out a  _ Goddamnit. _

He was such a pushover it was ridiculous. But on the other hand . . . 

“Tell you what,” Eden perked up, “there’s a jewelry store in south Central that just got a ruby and yellow diamond necklace in stock.” Brown eyes narrowed in confusion. Barry spoke slowly, “Make it my 27th birthday present, and I will get you your drugs back.”

“I thought you liked green more than shiny stuff?” Eden asked, head tilted and sloe-eyed. For a moment, Barry’s mind flashed to the rumor he heard about the Kahndaq Diamond making its way to Central sometime next year, but he knew both his, and Eden’s, limits. Instead he simply gave her a smirk and a wink.

“What can I say? I look good in red.”

Eden let out a delighted laugh and got to her knees as if to stand, only to crawl onto Barry and collapse on top of him. Barry gave an eye roll that went unseen by his clinger on and curled his left arm around her, ignoring the small woman’s tired giggle and the way she nuzzled into his chest.

As Eden napped, Barry planned.

Star Labs was having a huge event in a few weeks time, and the guest list was full to the brim with important people. Important people meant more security, and more security meant more cops. If Barry was going to get into the station and break into the evidence locker, his best bet was to go when Star Labs’ particle accelerator went active. The eyes of the city would be on Dr. Wells and his team, with no one to notice an extra janitor working the late shift at the CCPD.

Barry briefly considered asking Clyde, another friend from the system, if he wanted to come along, but quickly dismissed the idea. Clyde and his brother Mark preferred less personal jobs: banks, mainly, with the occasional B&E. They’d have no interest in a small job like this, and Barry didn’t feel like owing them a favor just because he thought Clyde might find it fun.

No, better to leave the Mardon brothers out of it. Besides, last he heard of them they were pulling a string of bank robberies across Keystone, and they’d probably start with Central as soon as they arrived. All Barry had to do was get in, get the drugs, and get out. It’d be easy, probably the easiest job he’d had in awhile. Not a Snart-level plan, but c’mon. The guy was a legend among thieves, and all Barry was stealing was a measly bag of weed. How hard could it be?

In about nine months and three weeks he’d regret that thought.

But for now, he planned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THEFT: PLANNED  
> SNYPTID: SPOTTED  
> OC: NOT A LOVE INTEREST FOR FUCKS SAKE DONT EVEN WORRY ABOUT THAT WE'LL MEET EVEN MORE RANDOM CRIMINAL FRIENDS ALONG THE WAY
> 
> Please please please keep leaving comments guys. I wouldn't have even finished chapter two if I hadn't heard from you saying you wanted me. If there's a particular thing you want to see or you have questions or I fucked something up LET ME KNOW. I swear I'm not scary and I enjoy ranting to people about the Arrowverse.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at chillin-like-villains. 
> 
> See y'all next time!

**Author's Note:**

> Chapters may not always be beta'd, so sorry for any mistakes


End file.
